October 14, 1943: The Sobibor Uprising

The memorial statue

October 14, 1943: The Sobibor Uprising occurs, at the concentration camp of the same name, in the town of the same name in eastern Poland.

It opened in April 1942, after the Wannsee Conference, and was the 1st camp specifically for extermination of Jewish prisoners, not just detention and slave labor, with earlier camps being adapted for extermination. There were 47 prisoners who managed to escape before the uprising.

After postponing their original escape plan by one day, due to a personnel changeover, the escape was launched. The prisoners killed 12 SS officers. There were 365 prisoners who escaped, but only 200 reached the nearby forest, and the rest were captured. There were 60 others who were stopped in their escape attempt. All were shot and killed.

The Nazi government ordered that the camp be shut down, burned to the ground, and a simple farm put on the site, so that no one would ever know what happened there. But the surviving escapees knew, and told the story. A statue of a mother and child was erected on the site of one of the gas chambers.

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October 14, 1943 was a Thursday. Former Dallas Cowboys receiver Lance Rentzel and former Utah Jazz owner Karen Miller were born.

The baseball season ended 3 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season didn't start until October 30. So there were no scores on this historic day.